


placing hands

by Keturagh



Series: False Fruit [9]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Sexual Assault, Battle, Demons, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Minor character is aggressor, No Smut, Temple, Trapped, doppleganger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:35:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21996127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: He cannot keep the edge of panic from his voice. This will be his downfall, he knows; he knows he must moderate his feelings. He must quiet his mind and center his emotions. But he had heard her scream and then he had heard nothing.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel/Lavellan, Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age)
Series: False Fruit [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579504
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	placing hands

“Inquisitor!”

Grit or dust is grinding in his teeth as his jaw works; he tries to reach out with a light touch across the Veil, looking for the sense of her magic pulling from the wellspring of the Fade. The bones of the shattered corpses trip him, tangle at his feet. He stumbles. A dry reek puffs from rotted clothes on the skeletons and a deaths head moth unfurls from one of the desiccated noses. It flutters, huge and eldritch, shining like its wings are wet with blood, bobbing behind him through the moonlight.

“Inquisitor! Pangara, Pangara!”

He cannot keep the edge of panic from his voice. This will be his downfall, he knows; he knows he must moderate his feelings. He must quiet his mind and center his emotions. But he had heard her scream and then he had heard nothing.

“Pangara!”

“Solas.”

He lunges around a corner, hand trailing on the wall to sense for any runes tied to traps beneath the tiles.

“Pangara?”

“Solas,” her voice again, more distant this time. He backtracks, turns the other way.

A statue of Mythal in her seat of power looms before him.

He almost walks past, but then a hint of fear tremors in his throat. An instinct; a memory? He walks closer to the statue and ignores the part of his brain shouting that he must run, he must find her.

The statue is perfectly nondescript. It is as any other of the mildewing relics of this sundered world. Its mimicry of flight is nauseating in this age, diminished to stone. And ever still a balm for him. Even now, a bittersweet icon of succor. And of desire. The walls are crumbling and there are no clouds over the stars.

He kneels.

The ground is cold.

He pushes aside a cluster of vines and his hands are scraped by its many vicious little red-tipped pins. They are already touched with blood. And then he sees it in the moonlight: the once-glassy surface tarnished, its face like a riffle in a stream. A mirror. Or at least, a mirror is what any mortal of this age might mistake it for. And of a magic he had thought long-lost to this realm.

That the nobles entrusting their eternities to Ghilan’nain would have chosen to bind their magicks to such a cruel net? That was her nature at the end; her gifts corrupted. Her powers shifting and angry. The surface seems to blister as he stares at it. He leans close.

He whispers, “Pangara.”

And she is revealed to him at once, the colors around her sickened and the trees around her dripping their leaves to the earth like ichor.

“Solas.” She moans. Not to him.

The creature that his holding her looks like him.

It crouches over her, tracing her breast with its fingers, pushing his touch between the bone buttons of her shirt.

It has wings - terribly twisted and mangled, covered in the sludge dripping from the canopy that rots above them, but even when Pangara reaches around and touches its back, when she grasps around the protrusions and caresses them, she gives no sign of alarm, no tell of conscious thought.

“Solas,” she says again, and kisses the thing’s bottom lip, its chin, his cheek. She traces her nails across the jawline that mimics his.

But in her whisper, can he hear the start of fear?

He does not say anything because he knows now she cannot hear him. He sets to his work. She is in danger and the portal to the dreamplace set into this plaque at the base of Mythal’s statue would only trap him, too, if he reached straight in for her.

He must find a way to come at it from the side.

Or better yet, the top.

He springs away and searches the ground for a stone. Finding one of correct weight and shape ( _and it takes too long, it takes too long_ ), he brings it back in front of the mirror. He can see Pangara and the creature through the flush of thorns. He sits cross-legged. Its long fingers (just slightly too long, and the nails now black, now clear) drop to tug at her breeches. Solas reaches out to the Veil and then does what he must.

Calling on a reserve of mana that is still too weakened for this sort of trial, he takes his conscious presence of the Veil. He studies it. Pushes at it. And then, a clean swipe cutting his own mind as certain as any surgery; Solas removes his mind’s protections, and he ceases to perceive Fade’s wall.

A rift (small, perhaps too small even for this) slams open in the air above the portal. It keens and glimmers. The sounds singing from the tear are almost loud enough to drown out her mounting gasps. He hates himself for how much of a relief that is. He feels the whole of the Veil around that point shudder, his sense of song coalescing as he works to sew together the pieces of his mind he’d torn to make this rift appear. And at the same time, quickly before any wandering spirits may be drawn to this curiosity in Ghilan’nain’s Hollow, he raises his hand flat before him. He breathes down upon his palm.

The floating green vision of the Fade swirls and yawns. He blows harder on his palm. The sides of the rift puff out, bowing just slightly.

A strangled, inhuman cry from the creature and then her voice, raised in fear and rage, snarling at and rejecting her attacker. He hears the sound of flesh impacted, but it is followed by a tinny echo that sets his teeth on edge — a mutilated noise of something wrongly grotesque. He breathes deeply again and blows steady and hard into his open palm.

The _irassalan_ had been crafted from both waking and dreaming. Places of imagination and physical weight, they had been interiors of both brick and the minds of the architects of Elvhenan. Solas thinks on the fate of such places with a swell of that familiar guilt. One such architect, he is certain, fights with Pangara now: a thing driven mad by the mutable nature of its surroundings while for centuries its soul sang and sobbed for waking and flesh.

A spirit comes near the rift.

And he knows it on sight, but still he must keep widening the cut. And he begs, silently, trying to reach out with his mana, with a message. Turn back, turn back, leave this behind.

But the spirit is Remorse and he has drawn it here unthinking. Sloppy and careless. It can do nothing else than walk slowly towards him from the other side, raising one hand in a melancholy, old familiar greeting.

The irassalan were paths made of dreams and waking. The one in which Pangara is trapped is adjacent to the realm of this Spirit of Remorse on the side of the Fade. As Solas weakens the Fade by touching this physical realm to its borders, the mirror at the base of the statue starts to glow. The sounds of Pangara fighting the beast grow louder. Solas’ ears are glutted with the downpour of harsh whispers from the rift, yells and animal snarls, and the deep throbbing hum of Remorse coming slowly closer.

He whispers words of power into the last breath from his lungs. The words touch and flame on his palm: a new rune created from the seared raising of his flesh, and he smacks his palm down onto the stone in front of him. The mark burns true into the rock. And Remorse is smiling at him, ghostly and sad, from the other side of the rift, and he must get Pangara here to close it — quickly, before the spirit comes through — and he hurls the enchanted stone at the mirror at Mythal’s feet. The portal shatters. The sound of it claps through the room and his ears are bloodied by an ethereal screech.

“Solas!” He hears her shouting, and he lunges forward, the little rift forgotten above him. He catches both her hands in his.

“I’ve got you! Climb!”

She struggles to pull herself up his wrists and arms, her body squeezing through the portal, her clothing and hair covered in foul-smelling flesh and sludge. He hauls her through the dwindling door and as she falls onto his chest he holds her close, then fumbles at her left hand. “Quickly,” he starts, hoarse, but the howl behind him tells him it is too late.

Confused by the tiles on the floor, perhaps. By the solidity of the ceiling. By the stone face of Mythal, even. By all the stars, stationary above.

Remorse becomes Anguish, the spirit twisting in its madness, and it tears itself apart.

“Let me up,” she rasps, and he realizes that his arms are far too tight around her.

She seals the rift.

They sit together. She pushes out of her sopping, blackened coat and he melts ice over her hair, washing the ichor away with cool water. She touches his fingers, but it is a long time before she will look at him again. And when he bends to kiss her wrist she shudders, so he does not touch her for many hours and warms the ground beneath them. It is morning when she reaches out and grasps his hand.

She watches the magic knitting the rune back into his flesh.

She says, “I thought you had me.”

“I thought I’d lost you.” He admits at the same time.


End file.
